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Fidelis T Masao and colleagues · CC BY 4.0
Landmark Africa archaeological

Laetoli

3.7 million years ago

Tanzanian site preserving 3.7-million-year-old hominid footprints in volcanic ash, the oldest evidence of upright bipedal walking

See the deep-time shelf

Wikipedia

The opening of the article, and a way into the rest of it without leaving the site.

Laetoli on Wikipedia.

Read the article

3.7 million years ago — older than the timeline's axis, which begins at 9000 BCE. Drawn to the same scale as the rest of the canvas, everything since would be a single pixel, so Laetoli sits on the deep-time shelf instead.

Who held this ground

Borders from dated snapshots, up to a century apart; precision varies.

Reconstruction

  1. Bantu (3000 BCE–2000 BCE) Border precision: Approximate
  2. Khoisan (1500 BCE–700 CE) Border precision: Approximate
  3. Bantu (800 CE–1400 CE) Border precision: Approximate
  4. Bantu peoples (1492 CE) Border precision: Approximate
  5. Bantu (1500 CE) Border precision: Approximate
  6. No border recorded here in this snapshot (1530 CE–1900 CE)
  7. German East Africa (1914 CE) Border precision: Defined
  8. Tanganyika Territory (1920 CE–1960 CE) Border precision: Defined
  9. Tanzania (1994 CE–2026 CE) Border precision: Defined
Border precision
  • Defined
  • Approximate
Image credits 1 picture from Wikimedia Commons
  • Laetoli Fidelis T Masao and colleagues · CC BY 4.0